Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemDrama as a Pedagogic Tool for Developing Academic Language Proficiency in the Middle Primary School( 2022)This thesis explores the use of drama as a powerful pedagogic tool for developing primary students’ academic language proficiency in Years Three and Four. By middle primary school, students require a growing bank of academic language to support their interpretation and creation of increasingly complex, discipline-specific texts. In addition, their teachers need a toolkit of evidence-based strategies to support students’ academic language development. Drama is one such tool. Through creating authentic fictional contexts, drama enables students to try out experiences, personas, and registers beyond those that are characteristic of a classroom. Currently, drama as a targeted language development tool is underused by primary teachers. Classroom-based research is needed to examine how drama-rich literacy interventions can develop student academic language and the conditions under which the use of drama-rich pedagogy in this space is most effective. This study examines how embodied, role-based and social/interactive drama experiences can provide supportive contexts for academic language development and recommends the planning and teaching considerations that make them most effective. A collective interventionist case study was undertaken in three Melbourne primary schools to examine how Year Three and Four teachers can use drama-rich pedagogy to support students’ academic language development. The researcher worked with three participant teachers to design three drama-rich literacy interventions. Key findings from the study show that embodied drama experiences can create a contextualised, concrete bridge between students’ initial encounters with abstract academic language and their eventual take-up and ownership of it. The role-based drama experiences created an authentic context for a shift towards an academic register in conversations between teacher and student on the topics being studied, prompting students to speak as experts and teachers to speak to experts, necessitating academic language use. These embodied and role-based drama experiences interacted effectively to provide substantive, concrete experiences on which students could reflect through an expert lens. Findings show that social/interactive drama experiences created space for dialogue and cognitive apprenticeship and, especially when employed in conjunction with role-based conventions and techniques, facilitated a functional approach to language use as students were motivated to mobilise academic language to communicate clearly and precisely. Other key findings contributing to knowledge in the field provide pedagogic recommendations to maximise the effectiveness of the supportive contexts for academic language development created by these drama experiences. These recommendations cover the use of academic language-rich pretexts as catalysts for the drama, supporting student and teacher confidence and competence with drama conventions and the need for explicit teaching of target academic language in the context of the drama conventions.
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ItemBɛ ŋme anfooni karimbu ka sabbu: accessing out-of-school children’s perspectives of literacies in northern Ghana through collaborative digital photography( 2020)Literacy is simultaneously a practice in which people engage daily and a global education policy challenge. Formal education contexts, such as schools, are generally viewed as the sites for developing literacy. Similarly, those that have been, or are going, to school are viewed as literate. When literacy and schooling are conflated, the understanding of literacy is narrowed. This has relegated 63 million primary school-age children to being considered out-of-school and, therefore, non-literate. This narrow understanding and hypothesis of literacy as a school-based skill has mobilised international advocacy and development efforts to achieve universal primary education and literacy targets. Ethnographic approaches to literacy research have challenged practices and policies of literacy as autonomously schooled, uncovering everyday literacy events and practices in which people engage outside of school. This study seeks to access and understand the literacy experiences of out-of-school children in order to support their literacy development. To support the development of out-of-school children’s literacy, it is important to understand the ways in which literacy is embedded in their everyday worlds. This case study seeks to access the perspectives of ten out-of-school children, from two rural communities in northern Ghana, of their understanding and practice of literacy. A collaborative digital photography methodology was developed to access the children’s perspectives during their enrolment in a nine-month Complementary Basic Education program. The study demonstrates different configurations of literacy in the two communities, and how each child negotiated their understanding and practice of literacy in their community. It also finds that methodologically, visual research can access out-of-school children’s perspectives through collaborative digital photography. This visual knowledge of children’s literacies has the potential to inform the creation of relevant and meaningful curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment to progress their literacy learning. Appropriate interventions can be designed when a nuanced understanding of children’s practices, knowledge, and understandings are taken into account. This will help to accelerate the goal to achieve universal primary education and meet literacy targets in those hardest to reach places.